Yunus Balcioglu

animatrix_

About Me

Senior FX Technical Director @ Industrial Light & Magic | Feature film credits include The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, Marvel's Eternals, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, X-Men: Dark Phoenix, X-Men: Apocalypse, Aquaman, Alien: Covenant, Pirates of the Caribbean, Justice League and many m...  more
EXPERTISE
Technical Director
INDUSTRY
Film/TV

Connect

LOCATION
Singapore, Singapore

Houdini Skills

ADVANCED
Procedural Modeling  | Digital Assets  | Mantra  | Pyro FX  | Fluids  | Destruction FX  | VEX  | Python
INTERMEDIATE
Realtime FX

Availability

Not Specified

My Tutorials

obj-image Advanced
Pragmatic VEX: Volume 1

My Talks

obj-image HIVE
Adaptive Fracture Synthesis and Propagation in VEX
obj-image HIVE
Face Peeling Using KineFX
obj-image HUG
Retiming Ocean Spectra & The Pragmatic Approach to Solving Technical Problems in VFX

Recent Forum Posts

Procedurally generate a sine wave in a chramp? Feb. 24, 2026, 3:13 a.m.

Hi,

You can easily do this using Python:

import math

node = hou.pwd()
parm_path = node.evalParm("parm_ref")
parm = hou.parm(parm_path)
if parm is None:
    raise hou.NodeError("Bad parm path in parm_ref: " + parm_path)

N = 32
cycles = 1.0
phase = 0.0
amp = 0.5
offset = 0.5
decay = 0.0

keys = [i / (N - 1) for i in range(N)]
vals = []
for t in keys:
    y = math.sin(2.0 * math.pi * cycles * t + phase)
    y *= math.exp(-decay * t)
    vals.append(offset + amp * y)

basis = [hou.rampBasis.CatmullRom] * (N - 1)

r = hou.Ramp(basis, keys, vals)

parm.set(r)

How to use curvature as a mask in 21.0? Feb. 16, 2026, 5:09 a.m.

janjansen
reviving this, could someone please point a beginner how to use the curvature SOP with (deliberately) VERY low poly objects? just scattering points makes me obvs lose the mesh and thus curvature information (same question applies to the physical ambient occlusion node) - thanks all!

(I am currently using the round edges node in karma but it seems a bit flaky at times around corners and I am getting inconsistent results between CPU and XPU and it doesn't seem as versatile as the 2 labs nodes anyway)

If you are working with very low poly meshes, another option is to compute curvature from the limit surface instead of the control cage.

The idea is basically to evaluate the subdivided surface analytically and compute curvature there, rather than on the original polygons.

I show a practical example of this in my Tokyo HIVE talk (around 40:00):

Pragmatic VEX: Volume 1 [4K] [H20] Feb. 12, 2026, 12:59 a.m.